Word: guerrillas
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...major hostages are free. Says Michael Shifter, vice president of the InterAmerican Dialogue in Washington: "This removes the only real bargaining chip the FARC had left in its dealings with the government. It's going to be very hard now to talk of the FARC as a national guerrilla movement - it's going to fracture and fragment even more, and the important thing for the Uribe government to do now is offer them more incentives to incorporate themselves into civilian society...
...maneuver couldn't have been more humiliating for a guerrilla force that a decade ago looked as though it might actually defeat the Colombian government. The question now is whether it can survive the demoralization, considering that dozens of its commanders have been killed or have surrendered recently and some 300 rank-and-file members are deserting every month, according to the government. They've even lost the enthusiasm of leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, an unabashed FARC sympathizer who had brokered the release of a handful of other hostages this year. The Uribe government accuses...
...ghosts of the past have an enduring power in Nicaragua, which is why the legendary nationalist guerrilla general Augusto Sandino has become the object of a political tug-of-war between the government and its naysayers. Sandino died in 1934, but his mantle - and iconic sombrero - has long been claimed by the Sandinista Front, which overthrew the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in 1979. The Sandinistas, of course, are back in power under President Daniel Ortega, but a group of old-school Sandinista revolutionaries charge that Ortega has betrayed the movement's leftist principles - and they want Sandino...
...Sandino's name was first invoked by the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in the 1960s, when it was a clandestine guerrilla movement. Its purpose was to establish a continuity with the popular nationalist revolutionary movement of the 1920s. While President Ortega may still imagine himself to be Sandino's heir, many of his former comrades say today's FSLN is nothing more than a vehicle for Ortega's personal ambitions, and has little claim to the ideals of its revolutionary past...
...Sandinista historian Aldo Diaz Lacayo says the image of Sandino is intimately linked to the Nicaraguan identity because "there is no one greater who has fought in the defense of national sovereignty and against foreign intervention." A Nicaraguan peasant who led guerrilla raids against the U.S. military occupation of Nicaragua in from 1927-1932, Sandino has been elevated in the national mythology to superhuman status, and his writings are revered as scripture among Sandinistas - and just as with scripture, virtually everyone can find things in Sandino's writings to reinforce their own political positions. Diaz Lacayo notes that even...